Temin, Howard Martin (1934-1994)

US virologist concerned with cancer research. For his work on the genetic inheritance of viral elements he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with David Baltimore (1938- ) and Renato Dulbecco (1914- ). Temin was born in Philadelphia and educated at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and the California Institute of Technology. From 1960 he worked at the University of Wisconsin, becoming professor 1969. Temin's prizewinning research was on a virus that has a mechanism which incorporates its material into mammalian genes. He discovered that beneficial mutations outside the germ line are naturally selected and that the mechanism adds genetic information from outside into the germ line.